A Bird's Birding Bio

    I’m Khloris! ^[source] I recently (early 2024) went all-in on birdwatching. Little by little, the more I do it, the more other birders find me (often very literally, walking around in the woods), and I’ve ended up subsumed into a whole social ecosystem. It’s been a very interesting time! This website is an attempt to create an outlet for that that I can share, primarily, with other people interested in birds.

    My as-yet incomplete education is in physics, with a focus on astrophysics, though it’s been a few years since I’ve done research. Right now I make ends meet working in coffee shops. It’s hard not to approach everything I love deeply as a research interest though, and birds have been the latest target of my amateur study. I still have a lot to learn!

    I’ve been in love with birds since my early childhood in West Texas. I still remember being six years old looking through a pair of binoculars at a vermillion flycatcher, and I remember vividly the first time I saw a Stellar's Jay a couple years later. For most of my life, I maintained a very loose and infrequently remembered personal species list. That book is lost to me now, and with a few special exceptions cobbled together from old pictures, my life list is off to a fresh start in 2024.

    I’ve developed a soft spot for flycatchers. Learning about empidonax and attempting to overcome some of the difficulty of identifying them was one of the biggest things to develop my passion for scrutinizing birds deeply. More than anything with birds, I want to understand the species I see and how they live and connect together. Every species fills a different niche; utilizes their environments differently. Even among species so similar that current wisdom tells us many individuals can’t be safely identified in the hand even with calipers and multivariate analysis, careful study shows different preferential usages of their environments. The pressures that shape those differences, and how birds adapt and evolve in response, fascinate me.

    To close, here's a little on identity, because there are parts of mine I find it important to establish: I’m transfeminine and nonbinary, though I tend to bias heavily towards feminine signifiers as a sort of opposition to assumptions of masculinity in spaces where that can be rife (she/they pronouns!). This feels especially important to put out there considering the demography of birders in the primarily texan social spheres I’ve gotten to be part of so far. Trans people are few and far between, and I have yet to knowingly meet or even hear about in these spaces (I’ve now heard the Philadelphia Queer Birders club has a high membership that includes at least one more of us) another active transfem birdwatcher. I know firsthand this isn’t out of a lack of predisposition or interest in birds among trans people. To that, and because I’d like to find more community and make more friends in a space where it can sometimes feel a little lonely to be me, I encourage any trans bird watchers to reach out.